Dust it Silver
by rendezvous
Summary: [One-shot] He tastes of raw acceptance, raging peace, and something bittersweet, like the last snowflake of pure winter. One last prayer. I whisper. I live. He breathes again, perhaps. --and in the end, don’t we all?--


**Dust It Silver**

**AN**:  And before anyone starts badgering me about my inaccuracy, remember that it's true a lot of these things didn't happen; I'm just writing it in.  Ah...the advantages of being a self-admitted-romantic... And I _know_ I'm not the only one out there.  Hey!  Come out of hiding, you! *winks*

**Summary**:  [One-shot] He tastes of raw acceptance, raging peace, and something bittersweet, like the last snowflake of pure winter.  One last prayer.  I whisper.  I live.  He breathes again, perhaps. —and in the end, don't we all?—  

*

I've always thought if you could bottle her laughter—it would be a pure, luscious sin.  She purrs soft as a cat when she's pleased, rages harsh and jagged like something shattered when she's not.  Her anger is a windstorm of deadly blades.  Every time I see her she is hiding her anger, and I cannot deny that that anger reminds me of myself.

Her laughter now—it glides down the back of my neck like fur, or velvet, or rotting, shredded silk, and Miroku falls to his knees beside me, screaming fury with an edge of fear at the wind-blown bitch who has ripped me apart, and so easily too.  With a mere flick of her delicate wrist, I am lying on the ground with my life bleeding out of me in a warm river of red.

The howling winds swirl, dancing to the music of their mistress.  They scream her disdain for the two worthless humans who have been such a nuisance to her master, yet now cannot stand long enough to pose even the simplest challenge.  She is laughing, and the bees flutter around her, wings of gossamer fragile blurs of rainbow and black. 

When she leaves she does not even bother to see us both truly dead and buried.

My vision burns, but I reach out for Hiraikotsu anyway, the sting of sweat and blood lingering like acid in my eyes.  It's lying there, after having been jerked around by Kagura's winds like some kind of broken puppet, shining edges dulled to bluntness.  Now I gather it in my arms, limbs trembling in fine exhaustion.  The smell of oiled bamboo gives me only a trace of comfort before the pain flares once again in my gut.  My back arches, writhing in the numbing torture; I still don't let it go.  I can't leave it here, because leaving it here would mean admitting defeat.  I don't admit defeat.  Not to Naraku.

I wonder where he's gone.  

_Hurt.  Badly._

_Miroku..._

When I next open my eyes, he's there, not a trace of calm left in his normally levelheaded demeanor.  I watch his mouth form words that I can't hear; his face is twisted up, brow arched into furrows and mouth a thin, hard line.  The grip of fingers comes careful around my waist—he hoists me up in his arms, and the dank air of the cavern stifles the breath in my lungs.  I'm suffocating.  That dull aching pain in my side retreats, but I retreat with it, and Miroku—I can't even see him anymore, only hear his voice, never the words, but that clever baritone that was made to laugh, not to cry.

_I'm not dead, you hentai.  _And even now the name bears some of my weary affection.

Everything is blurring, like paints running together until there is nothing left over but the monotony of gray.  The sound of bees reaches my ears through the stillness of our rocky prison; the screams of blood-hungry youkai screeching and ragged and terrible.  Out of the corner of my drifting mind I think I can sense them, coming at both of us with snapping jaws and grasping tentacles and bulging eyes.  Even when I withdraw into myself, trying to curl up into a protective ball, I can feel them, their presence clogging the air like a thick disease.  

_I don't want to die._

They are coming too slowly.  

_Slowly..._

His breath is deliberate and calm in my ears.  There is only one arm cradling me to his chest now.  And I realize—

_They aren't coming at all._

Despair splinters through my veins like poison.    

_Miroku, you fool—_

The blue-black rosaries embrace the lean curve of his forearm, a strand of innocent glass beads.  There is something dying in my chest.  I realize that it is my heart.  

"Sango!"  He shakes me, hard enough that my neck snaps back and forth, but I can't wake, no, not when the world still swims in a myriad of fading colors and emotions, emotions that are too real, too harsh, too painful.  _Why why why—_It hurts, but there is nothing left within me to mourn.  _Go and find him and butcher him and marry and have children and grow old—_And it's fine, it's _fine, _if he does it without me.

For all my childish tantrums—through all those times when his eyes, and his hands, wandered —all I wanted—

_"Sango!"_

I try to smile, to reassure him.  

_My stubborn houshi-sama.  _

When I close my eyes I can still feel his face hovering above me, hands feverish against the wound on my stomach, thick black lashes veiling barely contained panic.

_They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul._

There they come some more, and the rosary beads dance again.  

_I'm sorry._

*

The stars are out that night in a sprinkling of angel dust.  From the tender age of childhood that was what they were to me; and now they are shimmering lights that still hold some of my naivety.  My father used to say that angels that make their home in heaven overgrew their wings, become burdened by the thick, heavy plumes.  So they had to let them go, those pixy lights.  And everyday an angel or two would let a feather fall.  

Childhood fancy, no?  Pretty things like angels and feathers and heaven would put the sparkle in my eye.  My father told me the stories, and it didn't matter how far-fetched, or how fantastical.  I would believe him, because he was head of the taiji-ya-san; he was big, and strong, and kind.  And he was my dad.    

But does it even matter?

I don't believe in angels.  Not anymore.

_If angels exist, there would be no such things as youkai, or evil, or killings, or bloodlust.  _

Instead there would be world peace, and love, and compassion, and mercy, and other things along the same vein.

I used to be so naïve.  Or stupid, as I like to think of it now.  How is that possible, you ask, of a youkai-exterminator, grown and bred and trained for slaughter?  Ah, but that life was simple, an easy matter ridding some villages here and there of small-fry youkai who were too weak to do anything else but hiss and roar.  All bark and no bite, as Kagome says.  Sure, I've fought some scary ones before.  But up until Naraku...

Now I see the world without my rose-tinted glasses and my angel dust.  Some mourn their lost innocence.  I only mourn my lost chance of killing that baboon pelted bastard—

_He is so close, sitting there in his foolish monkey costume.  I am too blinded by my anger and hate and the murderous rage that gnaws at my chest like something alive—too blinded to understand—it isn't Inuyasha, never was the hanyou with his curiously dressed girl and the fox spirit and the houshi standing there behind him—_

"Sango.  Are you feeling well?"  He settles onto the grass next to me in lotus style fashion, lanky legs crossed and eyes concerned.  Still I watched those clever hands of his, suspicious to the last.  

"I'm fine."  I look away when I say it.

He lets me have my moment of silence, receding into the background noiselessness with no effort at all.  Sometimes I forget that Miroku is a born fighter.  He can still himself, his body, his breathing, to the point where even I can't sense him.  So it feels like I'm sitting there alone, but all along he is there with me, quiet, supporting, just..._there._

I'm grateful.

"Your brother—"

I cut him off before he can say anything more.  "Don't."

"Naraku won't kill those useful to him," he says, and the words are harsh.  But his voice is gentle.  Miroku is a realist.  He doesn't sugarcoat issues concerning serious things, like Naraku.  Or his kazaana.  Or my brother.  

Sometimes I wonder if it is a blessing, or a curse.

"But when will his...usefulness...end?"  I lay back, suddenly, falling down onto the damp grass.  What might he be feeling?  What emotion might be reflected there on his face that I don't want to see, coward that I am?

Compassion?  Disgust?  Pity?

I don't want pity, not even from Miroku.  Or especially not from him.

_Will we get there in time?  _"It's a lot to hope for," and it comes out a bare whisper, choking hot against the cool grass.

He is quiet for a while, fingering the bronze rings on his staff in absentminded contemplation.  "Hope is all we have, sometimes.  False or not."

I close my eyes.  The wind is like a soft lover against my face.  He's pensive; the sorrow that is usually hidden away behind the laughing face and the serious attitude now laid open to the world.  I don't want to see him like this.  It always hurts to watch your rock of security crumbling away at a gentle touch.  

"I'm sorry," I say, knowing that those two words would never be enough.  Not for the world.  Not for his cursed fate, or my cursed existence.  And yet...

His hand touches my shoulder, fingers stroking through the tangled strands of my hair.  Some part of me is marveling at his behavior.  _He's not groping me, not even trying to feel me up—_ For once, I let myself do what I want to do, turning over until I can see his face, shadowed and somber and still.  His touch is warm against my cheek, but his eyes are still veiled.  When he looks up, I almost flinch back.

He looks wounded.  Tired.  His other hand smoothes back a wayward strand of hair from my face, and the rosaries chime a gentle song in the still night air.  

"I'm sorry," I say again, and I settle myself down next to him.  He has stilled, and the shadows that play across his face are only a little wary.

I laugh then, a little nervously, and the sound rides the silence like a welcome breeze.  He smiles with me, tilts his head in curiosity.  I reach out behind him to tug on his hair, that little thing that sticks out from the back of his neck like a porcupine quill.  The action is almost a reflex, for me, and I don't quite catch the flicker of surprise that moves in his eyes at my unknowing, affectionate gesture.  

"Why do you do that, Sango-chan?"  He catches my hand in his.  I can almost see the question in his eyes.  _Do you like to touch my hair so, is that it?_

"Uh—affection?" I offer inanely.

"Oh."  But he smiles.  "Is that all?"

I resist the childish urge to stick my tongue out at him.  Strange, considering I never was a child in the metaphorical sense of the word, not even when I was, well, a child.  And I've never regretted it.  What good are those things to me?  Especially now?  

Yet...

"Sango?"  His thumb is massaging across my knuckles in the most distracting way, insistent pressure against the base of my wrist, sliding up to palm, then back to the fingers again, warm and soft and careful.  One glance up at his eyes tells me he knows exactly the effect he is having on my pulse.  

"Uh—" I get out, before the blood heats my face and I have to duck his gaze, tugging on my hand.  He lets me go.  I look up in surprise to see him smile; mirth and mischief, with only a hint of sadness.      

_You know, you've traveled with me and fought besides me and fought with me and felt me up.  All of those things.  But there's always something missing—_I want to ask.  I do.  But he is already looking away, escaping with that moment where everything was _just _right.  So I let it go.  

I have other times, other moments.  

_I'll just have to wait until then. _

*

I come back to myself in a rush of sodden nightmares and barely remembered nights when the fever consumed me; when I had nothing left to turn to but those half-dead memories of my family, my father and my mother and Kohaku and Kirara and the entire community, bound together by blood and sweat and tears.  _Kohaku.  _My eyes are stinging, my fists clenching until my nails dig into tender palms, raising welts and spilling blood.  

The lights that this unholy place emits glows ghostly green, like the crumbling leaves of roses right before winter arrives and everything withers away.  Cavern grounds bite at my hands with pebbles; there's nothing here but the stink of youkai and the distant rumble of ancient thunder.  

And I realize, with a sort of numbed faintness.  The youkai—

_—are all gone._

But I turn on my side and he's there, watching me with eyes half-closed.  _Half dead.  _Splinters of pain lodge in chest, and they're not just from the injury.  My fingers scramble past the gash across my stomach, but find only dried blood and tears.  I'm fine.  I'm not going to die.  But—

_Not yet.  Not yet.  No—_and it becomes a sort of chant in my head, over and over and over in never-ending loop of insanity and cold, frozen fear, and death.  The pallor that sits over his face is shock-white, like fresh-fallen snow, his hair too black against pale skin.  There are words coming out of my mouth, a river of barren panic that runs together like blood and water.  I hear none of what I say.  He watches me through drifting eyes like someone cut loose from his life, who's shaken off his worries and his fears and his soul, to part _(from me)_, soaring with the wind.  Only this wind is harsh, bitter; it snaps fear into the roof of my mouth, and it tastes of rotting fruit.  Some part of my mind is watching my younger self about to crunch an apple, and in my thoughts I am biting into it again, when my teeth catch onto the remains of dead maggots, white and sour, muggy as spoiled bathwater.  Bile rises in the back of my throat; tears strangle my eyes, a damning floodgate that never opened until now.

_Damn you_

"_You can't die on me!_" I scream, and it echoes and bounces and screams some more, like we're trapped somewhere in the deepest pits of hell and the only god here is a sadistic beast who wants naught but to taunt me with the sounds of my own insanity.

He smiles.  I think he smiles.  My hands are suddenly grasping at his face, pulling him up to me so that he rests in my lap.  A stray whisper escapes his lips, a sliver of fear catching in his eyes, like he is dreading death but wants only for me to let go, to save myself before more demons come and we both sacrifice ourselves to their blood thirst.  

Something wet touches down onto the worn, violet cloth of his robes, staining purple a deeper black.  I'm weeping, and it hurts, my heart, it's like I'm remembering the last wishes of my father as he stares up blindly at an unforgiving sky, and reliving the murder of all my comrades, and watching Kohaku die himself, his own eyes empty as a funeral pyre before it burns.  It _hurts_, physically, and I'm gripping him by the front of his shirt, eyes forced shut against the trembling wetness there, as if by sheer will I can keep him here forever.  With me.

"Sango-chan..."

I don't look up.  I can't look up.

"Run..." he coughs, painfully.  My fingers clench like iron into his clothes.  "...When you can..."

He smells like sweat and bitter fear and hopeless death.  But underneath it all is the _him_, Miroku, sunshine and Kagome's cheap soaps and the clinging scent of incense; my houshi-sama who chases women and enjoys the cold bite of stark winter days and sleepless nights where he sits with me until the sun lives again to transform the sky into a roil of red and pink and oranges—

"_If you die, then I'm dying with you_."

He touches my hair, then tries to push me away.  He wants me to run.  Wants me to leave him all alone in this unholy trap.  But I stay.  

He doesn't understand.  Why doesn't he understand?

The poison is taking its toll, and I hate him for it.

_For being foolish enough to take his death upon himself._

_For being so weak.  Weak enough to die._

_For being Miroku, and smiling that charming smile, and watching me with those violet eyes, and pinching my bottom at every chance, for understanding, for being there, for always giving me an excuse to escape from him at the my most vulnerable times, times when I think he's torn down all my walls to reveal the real girl inside— _

_For making me love him._

_I hate you._

But the words I whisper against the raw sleekness of his hair do nothing for hatred.  The strands catch my mouth like spider-silk, trapping what I say into oblivion.  And I can't just sit here watching him die, feeling him fade away in my arms.  I'm helpless.  I'm helpless.  I'm useless.  I'm—

—turning his face to mine, and the skin is so soft underneath my fingertips, like that of a baby's.  Some part of me notes the irony of this, humming away on the endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth.  Our lips come together, a gentle brush of angel wings, and his eyes are half-opened again, lashes thick and gleaming.  He tastes of raw acceptance, raging peace, and something bittersweet, like the last snowflake of pure winter.  He's warm, his mouth warm as a sunrise, and it's the only thing I can give him that he doesn't know, doesn't already know.  He smiles one last time against my lips, a curve of dying heat that steals away what words I have left in me.  _Breathe into me—your death.  _The poison lies bitter on the tip of my tongue.  He's leaving.  The rosaries sing a raw, naked song as they drop from a limp hand.  

One last prayer.

I whisper.  The beads are cool fire against my skin.

_I'm sorry _

The smile still stains his lips.

_Hope is all we have, sometimes._

The rosary grows warm.  My tears fall into a pulsating ground.  

_The mountain was a holy place, once._

His hand is warm; the strand of glass winds around it, perfectly.  Like a coming dream.  

_Purify me.  Purify._

I smile.

_Hope._

*

**AN**: I love one-shots!  You can mess around with the intro, knowing all the while the actual story is too short to really require an actual _informative_ summary.  **stifles the automatic fan-girl squeal of "Tee-hee!!!"**  

_Anyway_, for those who've watched episode 118, you remember how our two love-birds got out of trouble.  And for those who haven't—well, the foreshadowing and the word choice makes it kinda obvious, ne?  Let me know about how you felt, oh wonderful –to-be- reviewer. ^^

        


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